Fred Wilson continues his thread on Exploding TV - and seems to be one of the few out there who understands that all this technology and choice don't simply mean that we'll have more ways to slice and dice network produced media.
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Having now digested CES, NATPE, and a billion pages of text, blogs, business plans, VC broadband offerings, and Akimbo - the one thing that is clear is that no one on the mainstream media side of the fence is taking the 'citizen media' trend seriously.

There are a few reasons for that. One is that it all sounds too much like CB Radio or Public Access cable TV.

But what Fred gets right - and mainstream media folks get wrong - is that there is a critical connection coming between IPTV and digital production tools. And once the playing field is level, or at least open, some portion of both my time and my money that i spend on media will begin to move from mass-market sources to nich/focused sources.

By way of example - i watched both the 're-cap' show on The Sundance Channel, and read Jason Calacanis' daily blogs from Sundance. Jason's was far more detailed, and more nuanced. So where do both of these media properties fall? The Sundance Channel is 'professional' but biased (it's their film fest after all). Jason isn't a professional film critic, but he's active and honest about both his likes and dislikes and his personal relationships with some of the filmmakers. Jason was shooting video at CES, and i watched that as well. He's the kind of content entrepreneur that the networks should be concerned about - because i'd watch his take on Sundance over Entertainment Tonight any day of the week.

It's not professional vs. amateur that will be the dividing line. It will be content entrepreneurs nibbling away at mass-market media with nich, unique, compelling content. Both for entertainment -and more significantly for information. Because data oriented media has been all but ignored, but it won't be going forward.